According to Evolve Politics if you knew the true history of the Conservative Party you’d never vote for them – and that site has published an article to support it’s claim. Let’s have a look…

Virtually all of the Conservative Party’s policy decisions – from Thatcher’s Poll Tax, mass privatisation, mass deregulation, attacking workers’ rights, fox hunting, supporting apartheid and slashing taxes for the rich – to the modern-day Tory policies of austerity, zero hours contracts, supporting Fossil Fuel corporations, ignoring Climate Change, hiking Tuition Fees, scrapping EMA, slashing Disability Benefits, implementing the Bedroom Tax, culling badgers, supporting the Ivory Trade, and ignoring poverty, homelessness and the housing crisis whilst – surprise surprise – wasting yet more taxpayer money brazenly cutting taxes for the rich even further – have ended up being both deeply unpopular with a large proportion of the general public, and highly destructive for the rights and wellbeing of ordinary people.

Good point! Okay, but what about the deeper history of the Tories?

Before the Great Reform Act was passed in 1832, just 200,000 people out of Britain’s then 25 million population were eligible…  just 1% of the very wealthiest men in the land essentially held every last ounce of democratic power… With politicians who only represented the rich making all the decisions, the interests of ordinary people were completely ignored. In fact… ordinary people were forced to work themselves to death just to survive, extreme poverty and disease ran rife, and dying young was the norm.

Both parties’ records during this time were horrendous – including supporting slavery and rejecting its abolition an astonishing 11 times, supporting widespread child labour, supporting the death penalty for minor offences, supporting the transportation of citizens to British colonies for forced labour, actively supporting violence and intolerance against minorities, repressing and violently quashing any form of protest against them, and unashamedly supporting the interests of the rich and powerful above those of ordinary people.

Wow. How have the Tories changed, then?

In 1834, the Tory Party was officially dissolved and replaced by the Conservative Party. However, despite the change of identity, the ideology of today’s Conservative Party has remained almost entirely unchanged from their Tory Party past… to ‘uphold the social order as it exists‘. Or, in other words, to promote policies, ideas and arguments which are specificially designed to conserve – or increase – the wealth and power of those who already hold it.

The pro-elite ideology of Toryism can still be seen in the results of almost every policy decision made by the modern-day Conservative Party – and are most obvious in three of their major recent policies:

Austerity

The Tories said that austerity was necessary to get Britain’s public finances in order following the 2008 global financial crash. However, after cutting vast amounts of money from essential public services, a huge proportion of the savings were simply used to hand tax cuts to the rich in a brazen transfer of wealth away from ordinary people.

Privatisation

Despite a majority of the British public now being firmly against the privatisation of public services and utilities, the Tories have managed to sell off virtually all of Britain’s public assets into private hands during the past 40 years… The profits of privatised services simply go into the pockets of their shareholders. It is little wonder that the cost of train tickets, water bills, energy bills – and even stamps – has skyrocketed since privatisation.

Despite the fact that privatisation categorically harms the interests of ordinary people, the Conservative Party support it because it transfers wealth into the pockets of their super-rich mates.

Tax cuts for the rich

The Tories have slashed taxes for the wealthy for the past 40 years, with Margaret Thatcher cutting tax on the very highest earners from 83% all the way down to 40% during her time as PM. Successive Tory administrations have continued Thatcher’s work by further cutting taxes for the rich and raising thresholds at which the wealthy have to pay tax.

Corporation Tax has also been drastically reduced during the last 40 years, all the way from 52% in 1979, to just 19% this year. These Corporation Tax cuts mean that the very wealthiest corporations are now only obliged to pay one fifth of their profits into the public purse, as opposed to just over half of them 40 years ago. The extra profits that corporations are allowed to keep are then simply pocketed by wealthy shareholders.

The article goes on to explain how the Tories get ordinary people to vote against their best interests – by relying on supposedly-independent think tanks to push their ideology, by having it amplified in the billionaire-owned right-wing media (which squashes attempts to put forward other ideologies by sources like Evolve Politics – and indeed Vox Political), and by resorting to the well-worn policy of ‘divide and rule’; pointing to a particular group in society and pretending that the people in it are enemies of the majority.

The classic example of this is the racist slogan from the 1960s, which runs as follows (with other letters replacing the asterisks): “If you want a n***er for a neighbour, vote Labour.”

Read more here: If you knew the true history of the Conservative Party, you’d never even consider voting for them. | Evolve Politics

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